A friend of mine burnt me a bunch of stuff on a dvd. I want to try Gentoo and included on the DVD there is Gentoo universal, and gentoo packages. Is this all I need to install because I only have dial up and can't download everything from the internet. If that is enough what is an estimated install/compile time.
Thanks

Matt

That is all you *need* but the advantage of gentoo is to use their awesome portage system and put all those awesome programs you like on. As for the compile time I don't know (I'm downloading the CD right now ) but it shouldn't take too long...even if it does it will be faster than any precompiled distro.

By the way im also on dialup, it sucks (ive been downloading the universal cd for 3 days)

Gentoo... depends on how you are installing...
a binary install will take as long as any other distro...
but compiling from source will take a while.

i always compile my gentoo system from stage one. completely from source with high levels of optimisation, because its lighning fast when running... but it usually takes me about 20 hours to compile a whole operating system with my 1.3Ghz CPU ATHLON-thunderbird.

on my 1.3ghz athlon...
bootstapping takes about 5 hours.
emerging the system anouther 5 hours.
compiling things like KDE and X = 8 hours.

it all depends on what system you build.

I did a stage 1 install with X.org and fluxbox in a day. But I was just starting stuff, going to watch TV or going for a drive to buy lunch and coming back and it was finished, if you sat and waited it would probably be much less. Running a P4HT-3GHz, 1536MB RAM

yeah.. but your machine is a bit of a porn star isnt it... not many epople have a 3Ghz Hyperthreaded pentiumwith over a gig of ram.

So you can do like a stage 3 install and it wont take as long?

Matt

if you install from stage3 you wont need to bootstrap or emerge system... maybe take a 3rd off the time to compile a fully functional desktop with all the usual stuff (multimedia, entowkring tools, admin utils etc etc)

Id suggest recompiling everything unless you plan on not using it much or something.

by the way does anyone know if Earthlink will work on the universal gentoo cd? do i need the pakage cd to use Earthlink?

www.gentoo.org read the documentation

I did but I still don't know if it will work on Earthlink, it just tells how to setup/detect your modem

no compatability documentation...
well, did it work on fedora core 2 ? if yes, then its guaranteed to, if no, have a look in the kernel source for a driver.

it worked on FC2's built-in network configurator (system-config-network)....is this program only for FC? I tried it in KPPP but I havn't gotten it to work.

You seem confused...
Hardware will work if there is a linux driver. if the device worked on fedora, then you know there is a linux driver.

the program you spoke of "system-config-network" is specific to fedora, so that program will not be in Gentoo, but its just a dialer... or network configurator, im not sure. but every lkinux distro will have a program for configureing a network or dialing.

What is an "earthlink" ??? Kppp is a diaper for "point to point protocol" which is esentially dial up.... is this earthlink a dial up modem ?

Earthlink is an ISP like AOL, NetZero, Juno, etc. I know my modem will work but i want to know if i can connect to Earthlink to use the internet. I tried using AOL with my configured modem and it didn't work but it would work with Earthlink, i just want to know if that will happen again